3 ms·

"Technology is bad. It distances you from users. It slows down iterations. It’s expensive to build. It provides a worse experience than you could provide in per

"Technology is bad. It distances you from users. It slows down iterations. It’s expensive to build. It provides a worse experience than you could provide in person or over email." I don't quite agree with the saying that "technology is bad". Obviously like anything else, if you mis-use it, it will not generate the benefits you expect, but unilaterally claiming that "tech is something to avoid as much as possible" seems like pretty bad advice. That's kind of like a pure tech company claiming that "accounting is bad" and "try to avoid accounting as much as possible". Every company needs good accounting at some point. It's foolish to unilaterally assume it will be bad to have it. Good luck finding good engineers to work for your company. Or maybe, good engineers are really not that important for the company / product you're running / building, which is actually fine for a non-tech-oriented product/company. Most companies aren't tech companies and don't need strong engineering, or even any engineering at all in most cases. Just don't call yourself a tech company, when the focus isn't on tech.

richardbrevig 12y ago
You have a valid view. I interpreted the author to be re-stating the "do things that don't scale" advice from Paul Graham.
yeukhon 12y ago
I think, I think I have a different interpretation. Rule #1: as founder your job is growth. No doubt. If you go solo sure you will probably spend a lot of time coding, but don't forget about growth. I would imagine myself doing 30% of coding, 40% of growth, and 30% of rest (at least 7 hours of sleep and in-between of 40% of growth and coding I probably get to eat lunch, talk to people, watch a couple gameplay on YouTube). That probably would be my life for the first year of my start-up. Rule #2: for many apps, believe it or not, you can engage with your users directly. If you are a mobile app for restaurant, go out there and talk to people about your app. Hey, why not go on the subway and do a little pitch sale? If you are an account SaaS, talk to accountants out there? Social media advertisement is great, and you should do that, but don't forget to engage users without the technology. Your friends are your number one targets. If they can't engage with your product, why would Bob or Alice? Rule #3: When he said avoid building, he's right. New features are absolutely great. But focus on usability and basic feature. Pick either Instagram or Vine. They are great mobile apps. They started out with simple UI and a handful of functions. The early employees probably spent their time trying to meet growth demand rather than feature demand. If your infrastructure is weak, focus on that. Who knows if your app would become viral tomorrow or not? Harden your vms before too late. Don't build an image matching algorithm before you finish your basic search feature... Rule #4: If you are into reporting, don't go crazy on building fancy tool. Add a simple contact us / feedback button with a dialog. Don't build your fancy dashboard. That's for later. If you know ELK and you have done configuration management like I do as a daily job, sure, you can use ELK to do neat reporting instead of using GA (there is a whole GA discussion on HN tonight). But I will probably leave building ELK for a weekend...or do span that across multiple weekend. Have you done proper logging in your code yet? No? Go back and add some more logging statements. Building a startup is exactly like doing iterative software development. Plan something, execute, and reflect. Deliver priority, shovel other things into backlog. If you have co-founders or you already have hired early employees, you definitely need to do daily stand-up, and periodically tell the world about the company's progress! Ship basic features. Improve performance, resiliency, security and usability. Sell your product to users. Write blog posts, tutorials, videos so users know what the start-up is up to. You are a human. This is how I am going to build my start-up. The experience counts.

richardbrevig 12y ago

You have a valid view. I interpreted the author to be re-stating the "do things that don't scale" advice from Paul Graham.

yeukhon 12y ago

I think, I think I have a different interpretation. Rule #1: as founder your job is growth. No doubt. If you go solo sure you will probably spend a lot of time coding, but don't forget about growth. I would imagine myself doing 30% of coding, 40% of growth, and 30% of rest (at least 7 hours of sleep and in-between of 40% of growth and coding I probably get to eat lunch, talk to people, watch a couple gameplay on YouTube). That probably would be my life for the first year of my start-up. Rule #2: for many apps, believe it or not, you can engage with your users directly. If you are a mobile app for restaurant, go out there and talk to people about your app. Hey, why not go on the subway and do a little pitch sale? If you are an account SaaS, talk to accountants out there? Social media advertisement is great, and you should do that, but don't forget to engage users without the technology. Your friends are your number one targets. If they can't engage with your product, why would Bob or Alice? Rule #3: When he said avoid building, he's right. New features are absolutely great. But focus on usability and basic feature. Pick either Instagram or Vine. They are great mobile apps. They started out with simple UI and a handful of functions. The early employees probably spent their time trying to meet growth demand rather than feature demand. If your infrastructure is weak, focus on that. Who knows if your app would become viral tomorrow or not? Harden your vms before too late. Don't build an image matching algorithm before you finish your basic search feature... Rule #4: If you are into reporting, don't go crazy on building fancy tool. Add a simple contact us / feedback button with a dialog. Don't build your fancy dashboard. That's for later. If you know ELK and you have done configuration management like I do as a daily job, sure, you can use ELK to do neat reporting instead of using GA (there is a whole GA discussion on HN tonight). But I will probably leave building ELK for a weekend...or do span that across multiple weekend. Have you done proper logging in your code yet? No? Go back and add some more logging statements. Building a startup is exactly like doing iterative software development. Plan something, execute, and reflect. Deliver priority, shovel other things into backlog. If you have co-founders or you already have hired early employees, you definitely need to do daily stand-up, and periodically tell the world about the company's progress! Ship basic features. Improve performance, resiliency, security and usability. Sell your product to users. Write blog posts, tutorials, videos so users know what the start-up is up to. You are a human. This is how I am going to build my start-up. The experience counts.